Stop Relying On Digital Zoom
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Get rid of it – turn it off – do whatever you have to in order to avoid using it. Beginners in particular tend to use their cameras zoom feature as a shortcut when trying to compose their shots, when they really should be taking the time to properly fill the frame.
Optical zoom is helpful once you’re as close to your subject as you can reasonably get, but digital zoom will likely just make the picture blurrier. This is because unlike the true magnification achieved by optics, digital zoom merely increases pixel size. The image looks larger but not as crisp.
You can see this happen when using the cropping feature in your photo editing software to enlarge a portion of a photo. It’s doing the same thing as the digital zoom on a camera, and the resulting enlargement will be noticeably blurry.
So why you might ask, is digital zoom touted as a desirable feature by camera manufacturers? Probably because it sounds good. Heck, it sounded good to me upon first hearing of it, and I got as much as I could afford. It was later that I noticed what it really did.
Sometimes zoom is useful, but even here avoid doing it digitally.
Even if you think you need it, why not leave it off and take the best shot you can. You can always enlarge it like described above and have lost nothing. Better yet – take the shot both ways and experiment.
Something else about digital zoom if your camera doesn’t have image stabilization is that it’s nearly impossible to hold steady. Even shooting with a tripod is iffy.
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